We are excited to announce the 2018 Hadley's Art Prize has been awarded to Neil Haddon, winning $100,000 for his depiction of British author H.G. Wells cycling through a nominal ‘Tasmanian’ landscape.

Haddon’s winning piece, titled The Visit, is a textural painting on contrasting surfaces, layered with meaning, alluding to Wells’ infamous science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, as well as colonial artist, John Glover, and French artist, Paul Gauguin, to explore contact history.

Judge Jane Stewart said the judges were united in their decision to award Haddon the Prize.“There is no doubt that his painting, The Visit, is a complex and accomplished painting that raises many questions about landscape, custodianship and contact history,” Ms Stewart said.

Speed and the desire for mobility have transformed modern society. Both the desire for and the reality of speed are everywhere, and nowhere does speed dominate more than in the fields of information, knowledge, and communication. The ‘Internet of things” has changed the way we connect and interact with those around us, driving new economic structure based on a sharing community, spurring innovation and transforming community expectations. SPEED: mobility & exchange explores the place of speed and movement, communication and transportation, in our past and our future, in things, bodies, and images, in realisation and breakdown.

SPEED includes objects, artworks and teaching materials on loan from the University of Tasmania Fine Art Collection, Library Collection, School of Physical Science Collection, Engineering Collection, Geological Collection and John Elliot Classics Collections.

Presented in partnership with the University of Tasmania Collections Project and MONA FOMA.

Special opening hours for the MONA FOMA Launceston Block Party, Sunday 14 January - 12-9pm. Entry to the Block Party is free with registration at mofo.net.au

Strange Trees includes a range of artists’ interpretations of Tasmanian trees across nearly 200 years: from enchanted or ravaged forests, to the depiction of humanised, symbolic, mythological and historically significant trees.

When the colonial painter John Glover arrived in Tasmania in 1831 he marvelled at the “remarkable peculiarity of the trees” and noted with delight that he could view the “country” through their branches and foliage. In response, the trees in his Tasmanian landscapes possess a unique character, their lively, tentacular branches appearing to command the land and its inhabitants.

Strange Trees observes an enduring fascination with the forms, beauty and, at times, mystery of Tasmanian trees, simultaneously capturing their significance to our experience of the land. While Glover’s depiction of trees continues to influence artists today, it is Tasmania’s extraordinary natural environment that has inspired artists across time to depict trees in strange and evocative ways.

In a physiological sense, food sustains life. For all organisms, humans included, the ‘circle of life’ includes some form of food, and without it, the organism will not survive. However, for humans this basic view of food has long since become an insufficient explanation of all that we now think and feel when we hear the word ‘food’.

Imagining food: art, aesthetics and design investigates universal concerns around the topic of food. We have taken a deliberately international stance, but placed within a Tasmanian context. Tasmania is, after all, part of the global community. Themes addressed by the exhibition include:

Our aim is for Imagining food: art, aesthetics and design to contribute to a greater understanding of the diversity of impacts that food has on human society, and the ramifications of these impacts on our social, economic and natural environments, through creative expression. Tasmanian artists, researchers, educators and students will present works in a variety of forms—including, paintings, sculpture, photography, furniture, craft, installation and mixed media—that will add to the breadth of our knowledge about food, and reinforce to us all that food is much more than simply a means to sustains life.

Presented in partnership with the Ten Days on the Island Festival, the Institute for Regional Development, The Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, The Tasmanian College of the Arts, The School of Social Sciences, the University of Tasmania Collections, Makers Space and Burnie Regional Art Gallery.

*Imagining food: art, aesthetics and design is presented as part of the Academy Gallery University Museum of Art and Science “pilot” exhibition program.

Tasmanian College of the Arts & Ten Days on the Island exhibition

REMANENCE

Curated by Noel Frankham, Svenja Kratz, Zoe Veness, and Kit Wise as part of TEN DAYS ON THE ISLAND

The exhibition, Remanence, draws together Tasmanian artists working across a range of media, including: installation, video, sound, painting, jewellery and objects, and sculpture. Motivated by the 50th anniversary the 1967 Black Tuesday bush fires in south-east Tasmania, the artists respond to and represent fire: its power to destroy, transform and rejuvenate.

Artworks work respond to how fire has shaped the landscape and affected the psyche of the people that occupy this land. The title, Remanence, creates links to continuance and remains, but also references the scientific meaning of the term and the concept of residual magnetism and invisible forces that linger long after an initial object or event.

9 Nov - 11 Dec 2016

Neil Haddon’s recent paintings employ a collage-like approach to imagery derived from a variety of seemingly incongruous sources. They present abstracted, tenuous ‘landscapes’ in which we are free to consider how meaning is made when the supporting contexts for that imagery are strange to us. This work draws on Haddon’s experience as a migrant to Tasmania (via six years in Spain) and the ways that migrants find their own poetic meaning in the unfamiliar contexts of their new home.

The paintings use diverse materials and processes to conflate fragments of artworks by Paul Gauguín, John Glover and others, bringing them together within abstracted constructions to picture an unstable ‘Tasmanian landscape’. Here, meaning is in a constant state of flux and is perpetually renegotiated according to the influences of where one once was and where one finds oneself now.